Don’t Get Distracted by Shiny Objects (Bernie Sanders Edition)

by Daren Jonescu ·
Published December 9, 2017
· Updated December 9, 2017

How’s this for a cosmic reminder to keep your focus on what’s truly important?

A point of clarification or emphasis: I’ve noticed that in commenting on my AmericanThinker article concerning Bernie Sanders’ moral judgment on Donald Trump, a lot of readers are bringing up Bernie’s old essay which mentions women fantasizing about being raped. Others, meanwhile, draw attention to his wife’s financial embroilments.

Way beside the point, I would say, and extremely small potatoes compared to the real issue on the table here. My article is focused not on anything incidental to Bernie Sanders the silly old man — his youthful ruminations on sexuality (what does any young man really know about that?) or his wife’s personal corruption — but on the great moral elephant in the room for every socialist, namely the practical, historical reality of socialism itself.

To defend socialism in 1875 was to demonstrate the complete subversion of one’s moral and, if you will, metaphysical perspective by the related bacteria of German idealism and nineteenth century Romanticism. To defend socialism today, after a century of fully implemented socialist “experiments,” is to demonstrate a level of pathology incomparable to anything outside the general psychological category that Plato called the tyrannical soul.

I really don’t care what Sanders thought about sex fantasies in 1972 — that’s about the time, I believe, that Last Tango in Paris was a hot art house movie, concerning which Pauline Kael’s gushing review was, in effect, an extended rape fantasy about Marlon Brando — or even whether he and his wife are guilty of financial swindles. Those are matters of moral theory or legal investigation, and of little consequence compared to his having been, and continuing to be, a de facto apologist for the Soviet Union (Bernie’s honeymoon destination — how romantic!), Maoist China, Castro’s Cuba, and the rest of the litany of horrors that constitute the pinnacle of socialism in practice.